Endings and Beginnings, and Everything In Between
by I Took the One Less Travelled
Summary: Dad might be mad at them, but Leia doesn't regret it. Luke and Leia Skywalker might only be fifteen, but they'd never have left their Dad in an Imperial prison cell to rot. OR: Anakin raises the twins. Everything changes, but also nothing does.
Leia couldn't help but cringe at the sounds of her father yelling in the next room. Bail Organa was in there, getting yelled at and not saying much—but Leia could sense his shame and her father's anger.

She looked at Luke, whose most noticeable feature was the vicious looking black eye that spread, not just across his eye but yellowed across half of his face, as he cringed in time with her.

"They are _my children_ ," Anakin was yelling. "They are _fifteen_ , I left them on Tatooine _for a reason_ —I _never_ wanted them involved in this, do you hear me?"

Bail Organa finally managed to get the nerve together to speak up. "They _volunteered_ , Anakin, they were desperate to find out what had happened to you and so were we, and they volunteered."

" _So_?" Anakin snarled. There was a Dark surge, and Leia looked at Luke and winced. Dad was never pleasant to be around when the Dark shifted through him. He was just a little bit scary; even if he'd never yelled at either of them and in fact, only ever used the Dark when they were in danger. "What sort of New Republic are we fighting for if it sends fifteen-year-old children into military operations?"

"Anakin," Ben Kenobi, who they had been staying with for a week before they'd snapped and stolen his speeder to go to Mos Espa, and convinced a smuggler to take them off-world to Alderaan, which was the last piece of information that they'd had on where Dad had gone.

" _Shut up_ , Obi-Wan," Anakin snarled.

" _Anakin_ ," Ben, or Obi-Wan, as he'd said was his real name and their Dad had always called him. "The Dark."

"I _know_ about the Dark," Anakin snapped. "Believe it or not, old man, I can feel the difference; and I would hope that after fifteen years of _not killing anyone in a fit of rage_ , you would have faith that I can control it by now. Now, do you want to tell me how two untrained fifteen-year-old force-sensitives managed to give a _trained Jedi_ the slip and buy passage off-world before you could catch up, considering that you live _in the middle of the desert_ miles from any sort of population center? How did they get to Mos Espa before you caught up to them, Obi-Wan?"

"Anakin, if you're suggesting that I knew of their plan and allowed them to leave on purpose, then you clearly have no respect for me at all," Obi-Wan snapped. "And if you actually expect me to believe that they are completely untrained, you must think that I am a complete idiot who has no memory of _raising you_ , as well as a completely useless Jedi who cannot recognize when a couple of children are using the Force with more precision than instinct."

"Should we interrupt?" Han asked softly. Han had spotted them in a seedy bar in Mos Espa, and tried to send them home again before agreeing to take them to Alderaan in exchange for the credit stick that they'd taken from R2's inner drive. Dad had sent it to Obi-Wan for emergencies.

Honestly, Leia was surprised that she and Luke had even lasted the week that they had. And Han couldn't interrupt without making himself a target of their father's rage—possibly rightfully, since he had agreed to play intergalactic chauffeur for a couple of children who were clearly up to no good.

"We'll do it," Luke said, on the same wavelength with Leia as he always was. "Lei, want to…" Luke trailed off. Leia stood up and crossed to the door. It was better that Anakin not lay eyes on Luke again until he calmed down; since the very visible bruise on his face would just make him angrier.

Not that Leia was without injuries either; she'd twisted her ankle while running from a squad of Imperial troops, and she had a blossoming yellow bruise across her abdomen from when one of the Imperial troops had hit her with a blaster set to stun at point-blank range, far closer than safety standards dictated. But nothing as visible as Luke's scar from the fist he'd taken to the face trying to get the Imps off of his sister so that she could get to their Dad.

Aside from that, Leia just felt… _raw_. They'd come so close to losing their Dad, to losing each other—and she just wanted to curl up in a ball with her brother and her father on the couch and not surface for a week; hope that the world would be brighter when they did.

That was likely not possible. On top of their father being a wanted fugitive and well-known Jedi, now Luke and Leia had ten-million credit prices on their heads; and they would likely have to run before the dust settled. Their father had kept from being caught all of these years by laying low on Tatooine, running a small droid and ship repair-shop and raising his twin children as a single father.

Leia pushed the door open softly and slipped inside, catching it with the Force when it would have swung all the way open and pulling it closed behind her again.

"Dad," she whispered, not having to fake her uncertainty or her desperation for a hug and his reassurance that everything was going to be all right. Every time her eyes brushed closed, she remembered her encounter with the Imperial Interrogation Droid, the way that it had pumped her full of something that had made her shriek for mercy and relief.

They hadn't interrogated her for very long; since it hadn't taken them very long to discover that she really, truly didn't know anything at all about the Rebellion. The one thing that she did know, Bail Organa's name; she had shoved deeply into her own head and protected it with everything that she had.

Anakin was standing in the center of the room, and Bail was sitting on the couch cringing away from him while Obi-Wan admonished from an armchair nearby. "Leia," Anakin said, tension flooding from his body and the yellow in his eyes fading back to blue. Her father's Sith eyes were simultaneously cool and terrifying, an reminder that he would literally do anything to keep her and Luke safe. Right, now, even knowing that he could and would strangle people with a thought, it comforted her to know that her father would destroy the entire galaxy, if necessary, to keep them safe.

"Dad… can I have a hug?" Leia asked softly. To her horror, she found that her lips were trembling and eyes starting to well up, tears that she'd held back so well when Dad had first disappeared, when they hadn't heard from him for a week, from arriving on Alderaan and hearing from Bail Organa that the Rebellion had been out of contact for all of that time as well, to… everything that had happened on Dantooine.

"Oh, sweetie," he whispered, desperation making his voice quiet. "Of course you can." He crossed the room faster than she did, thanks to his long stride—both Luke and Leia had inherited their slight forms from their mother, their Dad had always said, Leia at five-foot-one was apparently even shorter than she had been, and while Luke was taller, he was slimmer than their father and was still several inches short of reaching their father's six-foot frame.

That six-foot frame was a comfort now; folding Leia against his chest and holding her like he could shield her from everything that was wrong with the galaxy with nothing more than the bulk of his body. It was a comforting illusion, even if Leia could no longer quite believe it to be true. Her eyes closed as she buried her face in his shoulder, not protesting when he lifted her off of her feet just a bit.

 _Dad, trapped in an Imperial prison cell/ Luke lying, unconscious and unmoving on the hard-packed dirt ground/ Dantooine, so different from Tatooine in every single way, an adventure that she would normally be overjoyed to be on/_ no, not even Dad was invulnerable.

She pulled her face from his shoulder. "Dad, are you mad at me and Luke?" she asked softly.

"Leia," Anakin said softly. "I have never in my entire life been more terrified when I was when I sensed you two on Dantooine. Am I angry that you put yourselves in danger, _yes_. Am I angry that you deliberately disobeyed my orders and went haring off and nearly got yourselves killed, _yes_. And am I angry that you scared me so much, _yes_. But all of that happened because you both are far too much like me, so really—I'm angry at myself."

"But we did it, Dad," Leia said pathetically. "We saved you."

"It doesn't work like that, Leia," Anakin said softly. "I'm your father. I save you, not the other way around. And I would happily still be in that prison on Dantooine, or dead in a hole in the ground if it meant that your eyes didn't look so haunted."

Leia clung closer to him and let out a sob at the thought—didn't he know that they couldn't lose him? Didn't he know that their family was _everything_ , that Luke and Dad were the only things in the world that she had and she'd do anything to make them safe?

"Organa," Anakin added. "My children and I are leaving. If you contact me again for anything less than a dire emergency, I may just slip back to the Dark side. And if you _ever_ send my children on a rebel mission again, we will be having words."

Then he wrapped an arm around Leia's shoulders and led her out the door and back into the other room, where Luke was laying back against the upper cushions of the couch with his eyes closed, probably feeling their conversation.

"Solo," Anakin said. Han stood up quickly. "Thank you for not leaving them alone," her father added quietly. "Going in with them was beyond anyone's idea of the call of duty, and I appreciate it."

"I can take you somewhere," Han offered. "Chewie and I don't really have a destination planned yet, just… far away from Tatooine—I owe Jabba the Hutt money—so I can drop you three off somewhere on the way."

"Naboo," Anakin said after a moment. "We're going to Naboo; it's time that the twins met their mother's family, and saw her grave. If you can drop us off at a spaceport where we can get passage to Naboo, I would appreciate it."

"I can take you all the way there," Han said, looking like he wasn't quite sure he had given the words permission to come out of his mouth. "Like I said, I ain't got anything better to do."

"Thank you," Anakin said softly after a moment.

…

Naboo was beautiful. The planet hanging in the sky vaguely reminded Leia of Alderaan, the green-and-blue-and-white orb that boasted forests, rivers and mountains. But a week ago, standing in the cockpit of the Falcon, hovering behind Han and Chewie and anxiously exchanging glances with Luke; they hadn't been sure what would happen but they'd known that they had to do _something_. This time, the atmosphere was much less tense and yet altogether more melancholy.

"Mom was really from there?" Luke asked their father softly.

"Padme was the queen," Anakin said softly. They had known this before, of course. Anakin didn't talk about his late wife often, but they knew that her name had been Padme Amidala and that she'd been the Senator of Naboo during the last days of the Galactic Republic. They'd known that before that, she'd been the Queen of Naboo.

They'd known that their parents had met on Tatooine when Padme had fled from an invasion to plea for help for her people before the senate, and been stranded on Tatooine without a ship. Padme had been fourteen and Anakin nine, and Luke and Leia knew that Anakin had fallen head over heels in love the moment that he'd first laid eyes on her.

Other than that, they didn't know much else about their mother; just that she had been beautiful and kind and gentle, and yet stronger than any politician had the right to be and so very devoted to believing in her principles; enough that when the people of Naboo had loved her to the point that they had tried to abolish the law that said that a queen of Naboo could only serve two terms. Padme had believed in democracy so strongly that she had turned them down and become senator instead.

Once, Luke had talked R2 into showing them holos from their parents' wedding; but other than that they'd never seen an image of her. When their father had found them, he had wiped all mentions of their mother from R2's databanks and made them promise not to go looking for answers again. When Luke had innocently asked why, as eight-year-olds were prone to do, Anakin had cringed.

"There are people out there that would see me dead and both of you under their control," he said cryptically. "I managed to protect you by making it seem as if the two of you had died with your mother, but if anyone starts digging into her past, someone might notice."

"But _Dad_ ," Leia said softly.

"No," Anakin said sharply. "Your mother. I loved her dearly, and hopefully someday it will be safe for you to know about her. But she is gone, and I have our children to protect now. She would want it this way, Leia, she would want you both to be safe."

Luke and Leia had honored his wishes, if nothing else than to spare their father the agony that had surfaced in his eyes. He was a strong, tall man who carried a lightsaber and had a mechanical hand, and a nasty-looking scar over one eyelid whose blue eyes sometimes flared with the terrifying yellow-gold that represented Darkness, when rage stole across his features and the Force gathered around him like a storm that you could taste in the air—their father looked like a man that could take care of himself. Nobody in the galaxy except for Luke and Leia knew that he was a very fragile man; and both had sworn when they were very young that they would do whatever it took to protect their father from his demons.

"Ani," Leia whipped around to see the shimmering blue figure of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn's force-ghost, long hair hanging past his shoulders and Jedi robes dropping to the floor.

"Master Qui-Gon," Anakin said softly, dipping his head respectfully.

"Hello, Master Qui-Gon," Luke piped up.

"What is it?" Han asked, staring around the cockpit in confusion.

"It's a Force thing," Leia said. "Hello, Master Qui-Gon," she added.

"Hello Luke, Leia," Qui-Gon answered quietly. "Ani, the Emperor knows that they are alive," he reported. "He has issued bounties on the heads of both of your children—ten million credits each; and he has declared that you are to be found and executed at any cost."

"Did he have any idea where we were going?" Anakin asked.

"No, he did not," Qui-Gon said. "And I doubt he would imagine that you were stupid enough to go here, so soon after being exposed."

"That's why I decided that it was time to come here," Anakin said. "I figured that the emperor would never think me so stupid—that this would be the last place that he looked."

"Ani, he's sending his apprentice after you."

"Mara Jade," Anakin said. "She's barely older than the twins, and her mind has been twisted by the emperor her entire life, Master Qui-Gon. In a straight fight I can get the better of her."

"She won't give you that chance," Qui-Gon warned. "The Emperor has ensured that 'fair fight' is not a phrase that Mara Jade understands. And do you have it in you to kill a child that is barely older than your own children; even indoctrinated since birth as she has been?"

"Dad," Leia hissed. "Who's Mara Jade?"

"A girl that the emperor kidnapped as a child and trained as his apprentice," Anakin answered. "She's young."

"He has her to replace you, doesn't he, Dad?" Luke asked after a moment. "You said that he tried to turn you; that's why your eyes are yellow sometimes, right?"

Anakin hissed through his teeth. "Yes, Luke. That's why my eyes go yellow sometimes. Once you've touched the Darkness, you cannot ever truly escape its' power; and he talked me into Falling before your mother went into labour. I still had enough of my own thought to go to her instead of carrying out Palpatine's orders—thank the Force, since he had ordered me to go with the clones and help destroy the Jedi Order. Instead, Padme commed me and I went to her instead and managed to retain my grasp on control. I… did not know about Order 66, or I would have tried to warn them."

Anakin bowed his head in shame.

"You did well, Ani," Qui-Gon said softly. "Nobody who was turned by a Sith Lord has ever walked away before, nor have they retained such a hold on the Light as you have. Perhaps, all of that time that the Jedi Order eschewed attachment they were doing the wrong thing. You Fell for Padme, yes, but she also brought you back—and if you had not had such reason to come back to the Light, you never would have. Besides, even I felt the occasional urge to strangle people with the Force when I was alive—that's perfectly natural when you spend most of your time surrounded by idiots.

Anakin snorted.

"The point is that you resist the urge; and that you manage to restrain your power when the rage overwhelms you. Maybe," Qui-Gon continued pensively. "Maybe the reason that nobody has ever come back from the Dark before is because they never had reason to. Because as a Jedi, they denied all attachment and therefore had no reason to fight the Dark when it came."

"Obi-Wan still doesn't trust me," Anakin pointed out.

"Obi-Wan has always had too much faith in the Code," Qui-Gon countered. "And Yoda is always going on about how _anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to the Dark Side_ , and _once touched the Dark you have, forever it will dominate your destiny_." Qui-Gon's mocking, high-pitched tone made Anakin snort again, and Luke and Leia both break down into laughter. Luke grabbed the back of Han's pilot chair, and Leia braced herself against the wall to double over. Luke and Leia had had exactly three encounters with the small green Jedi Grandmaster, and neither of them much liked him. He kept glaring disapprovingly at their father and making comments about the Dark Side, he smacked them around the shins with his walking stick, and he kept trying to tell the twins that their attachment to each other was detrimental to their Jedi training.

Luke and Leia had had a Force-bond since they were small children, and could communicate telepathically without any effort and feel each other's emotional state across great distances, were closer than most siblings ever dreamed of being and did not appreciate being told that their bond was a perversion of the Force, whatever that meant. Yoda claimed that the twins were too reliant on one-another, and that it would be their undoing.

Their dad had sharply told Yoda that they were his children, and he would raise them as he saw fit, and then usually just told them to ignore Yoda's ramblings; but neither of them liked him very much.

That was usually when the comment about anger came in, but generally Anakin just rolled his eyes at that. At that point in the conversation, Obi-Wan would change the subject to whatever Important Rebellion Business had brought what remained of the Jedi Order to Yoda's chosen exile of the Worst, Least Populated, Most Disgusting planet ever, and then Anakin would shoo the twins out of the house to explore the disgusting swamp so that they wouldn't overhear anything interesting about the rebellion.

"Only you could accuse someone of having _too much_ faith in the code, Qui-Gon," Anakin said wryly. "Oh, the stories I heard about you. You avoided consulting the Council for as long as you possibly could, whenever you could. Sometimes, when you _really_ disagreed with them; you would do everything except outright disobey them."

"The Jedi were… complacent," Qui-Gon stated softly. "They were stagnant. What happened to the Temple was a catastrophe that made the Force itself scream in agony… but the Council; they were asking for it. I always saw that, I recognized that from the time that I was a Padawan. I never understood how nobody else could see it. I still don't. Yoda is still utterly blind to the flaws in the Code; he refuses to see them even now. Refuses to see the obvious; that your fear for Padme sent you to the Dark, and your love for her brought you back. That your children's love for each other is the very thing that will bring down Palpatine, _not_ the thing that will ruin them."

"And Obi-Wan?" Anakin asked quietly.

"Has never once tried to insist upon separating your children, Ani, so do give him more credit than you are," Qui-Gon admonished softly. "He has never once tried to interfere when you didn't train the children in the ways of the Jedi, and never once tried to suggest that their Force-bond should be severed or that they are better off separated."

"And we've arrived," Han announced loudly. Leia had been so focused on her father's conversation with Qui-Gon that she hadn't even realized that they were approaching planet until they'd landed in the spaceport. "So you're probably going to want to finish up whatever strange Force thing that you've got going on."

"We're talking to a dead guy," Leia said flippantly. She wasn't sure what it was, but something about Han Solo just brought out the worst in her, and everything that came out of his mouth made her want to start an argument.

Qui-Gon chuckled. "Oh, Yoda isn't going to like _that_. And Luke, make sure that your father doesn't lose his temper when he figures it out, mmm?" he muttered cryptically, before disappearing.

"Luke, what was he talking about?" Leia demanded, turning to her brother. Luke's immediate reaction was to plug down on their Force connection and turn to his father to change the subject.

"I don't understand why you let Master Qui-Gon call you Ani, Dad. Not even Obi-Wan calls you Ani."

Anakin sighed. "Three people in the entire galaxy called me Ani, Luke. My mother, your mother, and Qui-Gon Jinn. All of them are gone, but Qui-Gon will always call me Ani."

There was a pause. "Aren't Jedi supposed to be dignified and formal?" Leia asked, still puzzling out what it was that Qui-Gon thought that Yoda wouldn't like.

"Qui-Gon was never much one for the rules," Anakin said nostalgically. "And he never trained me. He found me on Tatooine when I was nine, and likely called me Ani because I was an adorable, precocious little Force-sensitive brat and my mother called me Ani." He paused. "Thank you very much, Solo, for everything. If you ever need anything, please don't hesitate to contact me. Luke, Leia," he gave them pointed looks.

"Thank you, Han," Leia said quietly.

"Yeah, thanks for everything, Han," Luke added brightly.

"Well," Han said brusquely. "You kids did pay me _very_ well; it was the least I could do."

Anakin snorted and glared at Leia, who shifted sheepishly. They'd been so desperate that they had simply given Han the credit stick itself, rather than transferring an agreed-upon amount—and that credit stick had contained thirty-two thousand credits.

"Be safe, kids," Han ordered. "Luke, don't go waving that lightsaber everywhere, and Your Worshipfulness," he added to Leia. "Don't be _too_ bossy, it puts people off."

Leia glared at him, not appreciating the sardonic nickname now any more than she had when he had christened her with it, about half-an-hour into their journey to Alderaan when she had demanded to know what was taking Han so long in reaching hyper-space, since he'd claimed that this bucket of bolts was the best ship in the galaxy.

Leia still didn't buy it, but according to Luke (who was far more interested in mechanics than she was), whatever modifications that Han had made had made everything more efficient and faster, the steering easier to handle—but on the flip side, it had also made absolutely everything in the ship more prone to breaking down, needing replacement. Plus, the ship itself was incredibly difficult to fly, since all of the parts were so fussy and nothing was in the proper spot, since Han had moved it when he'd modified it.

Anakin grasped Han's shoulder and herded the twins off the ship, and the _Millennium Falcon_ took off again. Then he turned them to face the spaceport. "Luke, Leia," he said softly. "Welcome to Naboo."

Leia's mind reached for her twin's as they looked over the spaceport of their mother's planet. Maybe this was the end of everything that they knew, their quiet life on Tatooine where they hadn't had much but they'd had each other. But somehow, it felt like the beginning of something, too. Maybe, Leia reflected, both to herself and to Luke; maybe it was about time that she and her brother finally got to be a part of something bigger than themselves.


End file.
